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Now my attention switched to Minnie’s mother, Kate Allison. I knew from the 1911 census that she was born in Framfield, Sussex and she was 34 years old and her family were living in Beaumont, Essex.

Kate and her husband Robert had been married for seven years and it was easy to find an entry in the GRO Marriage Index for their marriage in Q4 1903 in Tendring Registration District. His full name was Robert Cecil Allison, and Kate’s maiden name was Driver.

This was too good to be true, it seemed almost impossible now that Kate wasn’t one of my Driver relations, but I had to make sure and knew that a marriage certificate would hopefully prove it one way or another.

I already had a likely Kate Driver in my family tree, she was my 2x great-aunt, but perhaps more importantly she was my grandmother’s aunt, which if correct would make Kate’s daughter Minnie my grandmother’s cousin.

This was the sort of relationship that made perfect sense, for some reason my grandmother’s cousin had come to live with the family, but why? Presumably there had been something that had caused Minnie to be separated from her parents and siblings.

There was slight problem with the age of Kate Driver in the 1911 census. According to the census she was 34 years old, where my 2x great-aunt would only have been 31 years old. Was this an acceptable margin of error?

Probably, but it highlighted the need for a marriage certificate to clarify her age and to find out who her father was (it should be Thomas Driver, my 2x great-grandfather), to see if this was my Kate Driver.